Ninja Interview: Tips And Strategy From One Of Fortnite Battle Royale's Best Players

Dave Thier
, ContributorI write about video games and technology.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Credit: Tyler Blevins/Twitch

Tyler "Ninja" Blevins plays 'Fortnite: Battle Royale.'

Yesterday, Paul Tassi talked to Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the most famous Fortnite Battle Royale player in the world and arguably its best, as well. Blevins has ridden the Fortnite craze to record-setting heights on Twitch, as well as a sizeable fortune that likely goes far beyond the $560,000 a month he’s making off of Twitch subscriptions.

Yesterday we covered streaming and Blevin’s explosive fame, but today we’re here to talk about Fortnite itself, what makes it tick and how to become a better player. So read on for tips, strategies and suggestions for improvement. Sure, you might not wind up as good as Ninja, but you might get a lot closer.

You’ve been at streaming a while, starting with Halo. How is Fortnite different from the Halo series and other games you’ve played?

Halo is really your classic, first-person shooter. 4 vs 4, very basic, and that gets done and has been done multiple times. What Fortnite’s done differently than all of them is created a fun, and friendly environment – and a free environment – for people of all ages to play and interact, and it's just incredible. Everything that they’ve done, they’ve been able to create a fresh game that really just stimulates all of your senses, and really it’s just so much fun to play.

Credit: Epic

Fortnite.

What do you think makes the game so approachable?

There are a lot of things that do that, like the fact that the graphics are way more approachable. It’s definitely clear when you’re playing a game like PUBG there’s this realistic warzone feel that they’re going to get, there’s a little bit of blood -- no gore -- and you get that Call of Duty war feeling. Fortnite is cartoony if you want to use that word, and that’s going to a good turn-on for parents when they see their kids playing a game like that. Not to mention that when a body dies in Fortnite, they just get materialized and warped back up into the internet. There isn’t really any dying, and I think that is something as well that is really beneficial for not turning away young gamers.

There's Free-to-play and console, but in my opinion, that’s one of the biggest reasons it took off.

How would you describe the core pillars of how you go about winning a match?

So, what I saw when I give someone advice -- I immediately tell them not to gauge their skill or their progress on wins. When you load in with 100 players, you being one of them, hypothetically there’s a chance that all 99 of them just shoot you at the same time. There’s that random factor in there.

So what I go in with and what I tell people is to learn how to play and learn how to shoot. What I like to do is land in a more aggressive spot – and that’s because I like to put on more of a show and challenge myself – but I go for where I know the chests are, and where I know a gun is that I can land at and get before anyone else.

After that, it’s all about rotating properly when the storm pushes you in a specific way and making sure you are taking note of where the bus was going, so you know of where players are on the map -- where they’re more than likely going to be rotating from as well, where there are going to be hotspots that are going to be pushing people certain ways depending on where the storm goes on the map.

That’s the midgame strategy, to not get overwhelmed from any one side too much. And at the end, its really just about picking your battles and making sure you don’t rush someone who has the high ground unless you have the tools – they’ve done a great job implementing so many new tools and weapons and grenades that can really change the battle.

You’ve got to make sure that you’re playing with the kit that you’re running. If you’re playing SMG and up close weapons, you want to be super aggressive. If you’re sniper rifles and rifles you want to make sure that you’re keeping your distance.

Credit: Epic

Fortnite: Battle Royale

So why am I dying so much? What are some common mistakes you see people making?

People are dying usually because they’re not practiced -- the game is still very new. I encourage people to put in the hours, more than one or two, in order to actually engage and improve and grow as a player. That being said, it’s important to make sure that you’re balancing your life -- not many people can make a living or afford to be playing the game as much and as long as I am, so I encourage a lot of kids to make sure to get good grades, and do well in school, then they can play Fortnite.

People focus on winning. They’re landing on the outside of the map, and they’re playing it slow, and when they engage a player like myself or any number of talented players, they’re just going to get completely demolished.

So my tips for people – stop trying to win right away when you don’t know how to play. Everyone wants to win, but if they just put a solid week of practice into landing in a very tough area multiple times, even if they’re not winning – it’s fine. They’re going to learn where the good loot is, to get practice with all the weapons, practice with people pushing on them and being able to push on other people, and they’re going to be forced to build in certain situations, and that’s going to improve their building skills. And they’ll see that they’ll improve that way much quicker than lingering around the outside of the map and engaging in a fight once in a blue moon.

Credit: Epic Games

Fortnite: Battle Royale

Do you have any tips for building, specifically?

I definitely recommend the same thing, being aggressive and playing in those areas, and you’re going to need to learn how to build to make it out of there. But also there are some instructional videos on YouTube, and there are some little videos that will tell you, you know, this is how you make a door, this is how you make a window. This is how you make a ramp and then twist it and turn it.

Once you have a guide like that, actually you can land on the outside of the map, land far away from people, farm a bunch of materials and then just start building around, little ramps, little speedruns, try to edit quickly and then reset your buildings and edit them over and over again until you’re forced out of the one and you die, and you should rinse and repeat that.

You describe these two very different experiences – dropping into Tilted and fighting and or landing on the outside to build. Do you think it helps the game to be able to have such different experiences in the same game?

Absolutely, that is something else that I wanted to touch on. It gives me a very MMO feel, this game. Especially with the challenges they’re adding, making you do look for things, doing quests, forcing you to land at Snobby Shores and look around for a treasure map, and once you find a map it tells you X marks the spot, find this place.

I got into this situation where I landed where I saw all these characters, all these guys with no guns just jumping around on the spot. And like I haven’t run into a situation like that. The purpose of the game is to kill people and win, and people are just trying to mess around and help each other out. Haven’t gotten a feeling like that since FFXI, which is one of the best MMOs I’ve ever played.

You’re’ getting these different experiences in one game, and they’re just nailing it.

What are your favorite weapons in the game?

So people ask, what is your favorite kit to run? And I say, you want a rifle – burst or regular – a shotgun, a sniper, rockets or explosives, and then your last item slot is healing. It should always be shield, because your shield is the first thing to go in a fight. If you get shot once or twice, you should be able to go recoup your shield.

For me when I’m messing around I’ll switch out the sniper or explosives with impulse grenades, or a boogie bomb.

So we have two things we know we’re getting in the coming weeks: remote explosives and a jetpack. What are you expecting from those?

The C4 -- whenever you get like a trap introduction as a player, I get a little nervous. I don’t know if it’s going to be for campers, or if it’s going to be good against them, like what if I could throw it into a room and blow it up, it would be more accurate than a frag grenade, if you will.

That to me will add another element to the game that won’t take away from anything, just another way to play it. I also don’t know the range, how much damage what it does: I don’t really know exactly what to think of it if I don’t know that it is.

And that goes for the jetpack as well. It might take fuel, it might be able to pause in mid-air and shoot accurately, but in my eyes I don’t see it being broken, I see the jet fuel really just being a replacement for materials – in an early game you’re very limited, mobility wise, chasing people down on a roof because you don’t have that many mats.

Let's say you pick up a jetpack, you have X amount fuel, it will only take you maybe five floors, five materials before you have to find a place to refuel. They’re not stupid, they’re not going to introduce something that will break the game – I think that’s why they delayed it.

Credit: Epic Games

Fortnite Battle Royale on mobile.

You talked for a second about interacting with the developers. When a game gets huge like this, it could put an enormous strain on a team. How do you think they’ve been handling it?

I’ve had the pleasure of being able to communicate directly on Twitter a little bit, and also being able to play games with them – the guys who are there, they’re just extremely helpful. I asked them why they aren’t releasing their numbers, and they’re just saying that they’re trying to focus on the game, and they want everyone to focus on the game and not on what they’re doing. Their heads are in the right place, they’re keeping their heads down and just drilling it, just going. They’re head down, just cranking out content.

These guys have the damn goose – they don’t have the golden egg, they have the goose, and they’re popping out golden eggs every other week.

Are you excited about the mobile version?

I am – the mobile version is going to help a lot of people pass time when they’re traveling, kids on car rides, I think they’re going to nail it. I’ve talked to some of the devs and they’re very excited about the way it feels to play on mobile. And as a streamer, the more people it reaches, the better for me too.